CMJ premieres Book Club’s “You Say It So Glacial”

Atlanta’s Book Club is not a book club, but a band, though that doesn’t mean they’re not literary. Despite their music’s pastoral simplicity (they call themselves a “rural pop collective”), there’s a narrative weightiness to their sound. Take You Say It So Glacial, a single off their upcoming album One-Way Moon. Dripping with little but soft strings and the delicate harmonies of guitarist Robbie Horlick and Rachel Buckley, the song creates an atmosphere in its lyrics like, “You say it’s so glacial/like Mars or the moon/another world sometimes/in your room.” Here’s what Horlick had to say about the track and the experience of writing it immediately following a family trip to Iceland:

Some songs you slave over, and some just pour out of you. It’s a mystery. And one of the most exciting parts of that mystery is when songs come to you whole. Paul McCartney dreamed all of Yesterday.I Love How You Love Me was written in five minutes on a cocktail napkin. George Michael wrote the sax melody for Careless Whisper on the back of an envelope on a plane. There’s something really pure about songs that come into the world fully realized. And that’s how it was with You Say It So Glacial.

All of the lyrics for Glacial came to me in about five minutes. And when I got home [from Iceland], I picked up my guitar for the first time in a week, and the chords and music just fell out of me too. The song is about relationships, but not just between people—between places, histories, intentions. It’s about distance, but not necessarily physical distance. It’s about how close two people can be, and how far away at the same time. Or maybe someone will hear it, and draw something completely different from it. That’s one of the beautiful things about songwriting—once a song is out there in the world, there’s no telling what it might mean to someone. It’s like the last line of You Say It So Glacial: ‘It’s steam sometimes, what comes out of your mouth. I never know when you’re gonna go.’